PocketMac comments

Patrick,

Why do people hate their Palm Treos? I'm thinking of getting a 650. I just want to combine my phone with my aging (six years old) Palm. I'm not interested in the data service/web surfing. I just want one less device to carry (and forget).

I have several friends who seem happy with them, although they are on Windows machines and not corporate AFAIK.

Thanks

I'm a current user of PocketMac for Blackberry and previously their similar PocketPC product (when I had an iPaq).

I cannot agree that it works flawlessly. My biggest complaint is with Entourage recurring events of the type: "the Nth X every",
For example, I have a meeting the 3rd Tuesday of every Month.
Labor Day is the First Monday of every September, and so on.
X and Y seem to be converted to 1 somewhere between the PocketMac and the Bberry itself and the reverse sync..
Thus Labor Day showed up on New Year's Day, and all my recurring weekday events all got shoved to Sunday.
Fixing them in Entourage doesn't help. They are screwed up again after the next sync.

It may be because I am synchronizing between two accounts (personal and business) and using the Bberry as the go-between.
(Aside: I've also tried using .Mac to synchronize but there are extra steps and other issues transferring between Entourage and iCal/Address Book. ... but that is off-topic).

Another issue is with phone and email addresses. I've seen work/home addresses get swapped in the sync process, and have seen the "Default" address also be changed. This is very annoying when I'm trying to send business email, and don't get a reply until the next day because the person only read his personal email at night.

I use the Bberry 7250 ("full" qwerty, palm-sized not slim). I've also had issues with battery life. When mine died on me mid-day in Manhattan and I was late to a meeting because I couldn't find the location and couldn't call, I got furious and demanded a replacement. They were out of stock on the normal batteries, so I opted to buy two extended life batteries and they refunded the price of the original battery. MUCH better. If a battery dying is not acceptable, there is nothing like having a spare.

But, there are still issues. When the Bberry battery gets low, it automatically shuts off the radio (and thus all phone and email).
BUT, when I replace the battery, it does NOT automatically re-enable the radio. Beware!

John Burgess
jtburgesspatmedia.net

--On February 9, 2006 7:14:26 AM -0800 jtburgess <jtburgesspatmedia.net>
wrote:

> It may be because I am synchronizing between two accounts (personal and
> business) and using the Bberry as the go-between.

I tried this on my Palm for about a month. It pretty much ended in disaster.
I ended up with so many duplicated and duplicated/repeating events that I
was getting 4 alarms for every event.

I still occasionally have to clean out duplicate holiday entries from my
Outlook at work.

> I still occasionally have to clean out duplicate holiday entries
> from my
> Outlook at work.


To solve the duplicate entry problem on Palm... look for an old
program called undupe. It has been a few years, but it saved me many
times.

Scott